I levelled my DK with skinning & mining and recently swapped skinning for jewelcrafting. Since hitting 350 about 2 weeks ago I’ve made approx 9000g profit and I’m sure I could make more with more effort.
For better or worse I took the decision not to buy any rare/epic cuts using the daily tokens. The cut gem market seems very competitive on my server and this late in the expansion I’m not fussed about trying to collect the recipes. Bear in mind 1 daily token = 1 dragon’s eye = 100g so it’s a real investment to pick up recipes.
So here’s what I do.
1. Do the daily, buy dragon’s eyes, that’s approx 100g a day. 2. Scan the auction house for uncut rare gems e.g. Forest Emeralds. If you see any for less than 4.5g, buy them, cut them (any trainer-learned recipe) and vendor them for instant profit. You’ll be surprised how many of these you find. 3. Get the 4 recipes at skill 350 (2 rings, 2 necks) which use 2 crystallized earth and 1 uncommon gem. These vendor for 3.14g so if you can get the mats for less that’s instant profit. There is an option to disenchant instead of vendor but the numbers don’t seem worth the extra work to me, ymmv. My personal limits are max 0.3g per crystallized earth and max 1g per uncommon gem, that gives ~1.5g profit per item. Use different price limits depending how you value your time. 4. Prospecting Saronite Ore. If you pay a maximum of 60s per saronite ore this price ensures you are guaranteed to make a (very small) profit even if you simply vendor everything when you are finished i.e. you can’t really lose, except for the time spent processing everything. If you want you can auction all the products from prospecting, though there is risk due to undercutting, relisting fees, etc. I tend to take a conservative approach. I cut and vendor green/purple uncommon gems along with orange/yellow/purple/green rare gems. I make and vendor green items using the red/yellow/orange/blue gems as per item 3 above. That leaves only two types of gem, blue and red rare gems, which I auction. Using my conservative, mainly vendored scheme makes ~4g profit per stack of saronite ore bought at a max price of 12g per stack (60s per ore as mentioned earlier) and is fairly risk-free. Depending on the rare gem market on your server (for me red is 30-40g, others are 4-8g generally) and if you’re prepared to battle for market share in the auction house there is the potential for more proits. Up to you how much risk and effort you want to take on.
I’m only skill 447 so not quite ready to prospect titanium ore but that’s what I’ll be looking into next to see how the numbers work out.
